It's good to use organic, non-GMO white whole wheat flour, if it's available, and I never use any fat other than butter. But, if these things are not available to you, by understanding the principles of pastry making, yours will always be better than commercial pastry, even if your flour isn't wonderful.
I know most of you reading this probably disapprove of eating pastry but it's something I grew up with, and I still love it. |
Ingredients - your choice
True, these days you'd better be wary of your ingredients, though.
And here's a list of ingredients from your commercial freezer ready to use pastry shells:
Wheat flour, water, vegetable oils (rapeseed, palm), palm fats, salt,preservative,potassium, sorbate, emulsifier: mono and diglycerides of fatty acids.
To be honest, they might be perfectly fine. Its just I have this strange hangup about people putting things in my food that I don't know about and can't spell.
A moral dilemma
Those fats are hard fats, making them much easier to work with, but it's easy to see that unlike butter which is liquid at body temperature, common sense dictates that they would be a powerful factor in lining arteries with fat.
I always remember when I attended a commercial baking school, the instructor maintained he would never buy commercial puff pastry products, because of the fat we used. It was in thin layers of what looked like paraffin wax, that made puff pastry making a breeze, and gave a beautiful looking result.
Hypocritical? Yes. The students' inexpensive products were snapped up by the public every day after class.
He wasn't the only one to seriously question the moral issues of using baker's specially formulated fats. This moral dilemma question by a pastry chef sums up why you might like to find ways of producing your own beautiful pastry products at home. His extraordinary public questioning might just be of huge service to many people.
Now for the butter short crust pastry!
1. Use 2 cups flour in a large bowl.
2. Add 7 oz ice cold butter, cut into cubes
3. Now cut the butter into the flour, using a dull knife, or a pastry cutter. You need to leave pea-sized little lumps of butter, but all the flour should be coated with the fat. This is what gives you tender pastry, because it stops that stretchy gluten protein from developing.
4. Mix the following together lightly with a fork.
1/3 cup water
1 egg
1 Tbs white vinegar
5. Sprinkle this mixture over the first one, and using the same fork, with a scooping motion, mix until the pastry holds together, and the bowl underneath the mixture is clean.
6. Divide the mixture in half, flatten with your hands, cover with plastic wrap and let it rest in the fridge while you make your filling, whatever that is!
Normally I make 4x this quantity, and freeze it, so I always have some pastry on hand. It keeps for months in the freezer. Also, I use my stand mixer for the large quantity, amend it works well. Not everyone has one though.
It's important to know that one of the basic principles of pastry making is to ensure it is cool in the making, and hot in the baking!
Now this is a recipe requested by my webmaster, femmeflashpoint of flashPress. She wants my butter tarts!
Yummeeee!!!!
I make these very tiny most of the time, just one mouthful, but in spite of my best efforts to save people from themselves, they always seem to need more mouthfuls for proper appraisal! I don't make them very often, but they are wonderful.
Butter tarts - the filling
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup butter, melted (NOT margarine)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon vinegar
1 teaspoon fresh lemon or lime juice
2 eggs
1 cup organic corn syrup
optional 1/3 cup raisins or 1/3 cup pecans, or just use none of these.
Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Mix the brown sugar into the melted butter. I use a 4 cup measuring cup for this. Then I just add all the other ingredients.
3. Add the vanilla, vinegar and lemon or lime juice.
4. Beat the eggs lightly and add to mixture; add corn syrup. I use a kitchen scale for this, and just add the syrup until the weight is right ( 12 fl. ozs)
5. Sprinkle optional ingredients into the bottom of each shell
6. Ladle the filling into the tart shells, filling about 2/3 of each shell.
7. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20 minutes or until the filling is just barely set.
8. Allow to cool before tasting!
Below is a slide show depicting fresh tarts from start to finish, made before sunrise this morning!
Thank you for your visit today and I hope you'll enjoy making and sharing these wonderful pastries as much as I do!